


Fossil in Steel

by ironwreath (broodingmischief)



Series: dungeons & dragons [8]
Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game), Original Work
Genre: Blood and Injury, Blood and Violence, Developing Friendships, Found Family, Friendship, Gen, Multi, Other, Past Brainwashing, Personal Growth, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-21
Updated: 2020-02-21
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:47:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 3,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22825111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/broodingmischief/pseuds/ironwreath
Summary: Snippets into Cadiana Jacqueline Steelsong; half-orc paladin of conquest of the Order of the Steel Reign. A relic of three hundred years past. Set in an original universe.Cross posted from Tumblr.Art of Cady here.
Series: dungeons & dragons [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1638913





	1. Repair

**Author's Note:**

> Cady is no longer an active character, but I thought I'd post her works anyway! 
> 
> Any number between brackets indicates the session the fic takes place around. If there are no brackets, it takes place before or after the game or at an ambiguous point in time. These ficlets are in chronological order of the game's events and character's lives, not in the order I wrote them.
> 
> "Most species bare their teeth as a threat, as a display of aggression, of leadership. It is a reminder that these clenched jaws can and will open your yielding throat.
> 
> I want you to think of this next time I smile."

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cadiana visits her old home from before she was petrified.

Cadiana stood on the threshold of the house. It should have been easy. Raise a fist, knock. She had done it a thousand times before without hesitation. But she felt as if she were stone again, her limbs heavy and unmoving. 

She didn’t know what held her back. There was nothing to fear, and she knew the truth of what happened to her mother. It was simply completing the puzzle of where her father had gone. He could have moved out from anywhere to several months ago to two hundred years ago.

Onlookers on the street behind her began to slow and stare at the looming half-orc clad in heavy armour, their indistinct whispers reaching her ears. She inhaled, raised an arm, and pounded on the door.

She waited. From inside she heard footfalls, a call, and then the door creaked open to reveal a dwarven man. He only reached her mid-thigh and stepped back to crane his neck to get a proper look at her, adjusting a pair of half-moon spectacles as he did. He scratched at a head of thick, orange hair and squinted out a pair of pale blue eyes, startlingly similar to her father’s.

Half-orcs were unusual in Arythiliel. Dwarves, moreso.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

Cadiana stared, then looked over his head. She couldn’t make out much of the interior, but from what she could see the furnishings were all replaced and the rooms were aligned differently. From the bottom of the stairway she could make out the form of a dwarven woman, hands on her hips.

She cleared her throat. “Lieutenant Cadiana Jacqueline Steelsong. I’m with— ” She stopped herself. “I’m a paladin of Ydoine. I’m not here on any official business.”

“Oh, fancy. And what brings you here to my humble abode?”

She knew there was no eloquent way to phrase this. “I used to live here.”

“Er.” The dwarf switched from scratching his hair to stroking his beard. “Did ya now?”

She grunted. It was the home of her parents, technically. She had spent more time in the temple and considered the temple her home, but it felt important to visit.

“I did.”

“And when was that? I don’t recall ever purchasin’ this place from any half-orcs.”

“And what about an elven man?”

“Aye, probably. Buy most things from elves here.”

“Did he have red hair? Was he this tall?” She measured outwards from her mouth with a flat hand.

He looked at her quizzically. “No?”

Her shoulders sunk marginally. “I lived here three hundred years ago.”

He shook his head. “Riight. Sure you’re not lost? Maybe got the wrong house, miss?”

Frustration prickled at the back of her neck and her shoulders snapped upright and taut. “I’m not lost.”

“’Kay, say you’re not lost and say you lived here three hundred years ago. Still doesn’t explain _why_ you’re here. What’re you wantin’?”

“He’s my father, and nobody can tell me where exactly he’s gone,” she explained. “As for why else, I don’t know. It felt important.” 

She didn’t normally ‘do’ things that felt important for the sake of it. Normally she had orders that determined what was important for her. She looked up at the door frame, then past it to the shingles of the roof and beyond that, the dome of the baby blue sky.

Maybe it was to see if there was any sort of remnant of her mother that wasn’t stone and earth, but it had been so long. Everything was stale and the dust had settled. A grave hadn’t been enough to satisfy her, she needed something with more life and memories to it. Maybe her father was that missing link and the house wasn’t. 

The dwarf had begun tapping his foot. She locked him in her stare again.

“I think it’s to say goodbye as well,” she said. “I’m leaving the city and I don’t know when I’ll return. I never got a proper goodbye before, so I’m doing so now.” 

“Goodbye to the house?” he asked.

“Yes.” She narrowed her eyes. “Yes and no. I wish I had a better answer for you.”

“Well, ya can give it a goodbye from outside,” he said. “And a goodbye from me, too. Goodbye!” The door slammed in her face. She snorted and strode to the middle of the front lawn, turning to glare up at the building. Buildings weren’t people. What was she thinking?

It looked as though it had been repainted and repaired in patches, but the core remained intact. She reached up to brush her fingers against her one tusk, then wrung her hands to feel the stub where her pinky finger had once been. The house could be repaired and maintained. Could she?

Had she ever been broken? Could she replace what she’d lost?

She turned in a huff and stalked back down the street. 


	2. Unknown

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cadiana experiences fear and doesn't understand why.

[8]

The underground entrance loomed before them. Cadiana approached. **  
**

It wasn’t tall, perhaps only a few feet above her head. But as the distance closed, her feet filled with sand. Her heart raced as if she’d sprinted a mile in her armour carrying her horse on her back. Sweat broke out over her skin and she shook out her gauntlets as if that would help her clammy palms. Ten feet before the entrance, her muscles seized up and she stopped cold in her tracks.

It was like an invisible wall of force, only that force was herself. She had fought a fire elemental not long ago and lived. She rarely had to fight herself. 

Was she sick? Inrae suspected magic, but only briefly. Sylitae took on a look of understanding. As Sylitae explained, a word passed their lips. Fear. The rest became background noise. 

Cadiana had felt fear before, but only long ago, when she was a child among a bustling city and had a sword lunged at her for the first time. It was when she was a teenager being trained by the temple of Ydoine until every last drop of fear was wrung from her bones and only a steely foundation remained. If she had felt fear between then and now, it was never enough to quash her fighting spirit and cause such a violent reaction.

She was beginning to learn that fear had a time and place. For battle, a healthy dose of fear meant a certain level of self-preservation. Cowardice, sure, but an alive coward. In willingly setting herself alight for what felt like almost a minute by not backing down from the fire elemental, she perhaps lacked that. She had no regret for what she’d done, though. If not her, then who else? Anyone else would have melted. 

But this had no rhyme or reason, no purpose or explanation. She had been in caves before. She growled and threw down her fists, turning on her heel and stalking back in a short line before she re-approached. The cave looked bigger than before, the darkness blacker and the edge of the stones like jagged teeth that would chew her up and spit her out. She stopped only a foot from where she’d been, her heart throbbing hard enough to be felt through her breastplate. 

She could also see why fear had been almost completely scrubbed from her consciousness. This was torture. She would rather take a knife to the side. That, at least, she knew. She knew roughly how long the pain would last and it stayed in one place. She could heal it up, even. Being shaken from her core by her emotions was unpredictable and she had no idea when it would end.

And if it came for something so mundane, it could strike again, even mid-combat. She would be a poor excuse of a soldier to be seen like this when she should be at her peak. 

Sylitae sat her down and walked her through some breathing exercises that calmed her nerves enough that she could urge her feet the last of the distance. As the shadow of the cave passed over them and blotted out the sun, she, too, felt it like an imprint pressed on her soul. 


	3. Grave

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After burying an acquaintance, Cadiana thinks about her orc mother dying of old age.

[11]

Cadiana stared at the disturbed earth and tombstone of the makeshift grave. The sun had sat above the horizon when they had all started and it had since set, the inky blue of night enveloping her. Sylitae, Rosie, and Inrae had returned to camp, but she remained, motionless, her darkvision granting her sight.

A strange emotion she couldn’t quite place kindled within her. She coiled her fingers into fists and uncurled them, staring hard at the name of their elven acquaintance as if it would give her an answer. But she couldn’t force words out of stone.

It wasn't long ago she stood at another grave, she thought. She felt a different emotion at her mother’s grave. At the time was quietly bereft. Here, she was sad, but in a different way. She wasn’t sad in the same way Sylitae had been, but she also didn't have the same connection Sylitae had found in another elf. Cady was only half that.

Death came to everyone, and exceptions were abominations. It was only unfortunate that Shii’Lakan’s time came before she deserved.

Cady sighed, the breeze catching her breath and carrying the sound to the trees. It caught the folds of her cloak and shocked a chill into her. She turned to the nearby copse and trudged about in the brush until she found a smattering of wildflowers. They looked white, though it was difficult to tell in the shadows, each with five petals and soft, golden tendrils reaching out from the center. She plucked one, returned to the grave, and laid it on the earth.

Being involved in the process of digging a shallow grave for Shii’Lakan’s bones was cathartic in a way she hadn’t expected, but it made her wonder if her mother received the same treatment. Being here made her wistful for something she hadn’t taken part of. Did she receive eulogies? Was she buried as a body or as ashes? How many attended her funeral? Was she given flowers? 

All questions for her father, she supposed. She murmured a small, final prayer, turned on her heel and strode back to camp.


	4. Portrait

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cadiana draws her father so Inrae can contact him with a sending spell.

[17]

Cady’s fingers paused when she lowered her pencil to paper. She owned a small sketchbook and the few pages she’d filled mostly contained flowers she’d come across with the occasional scribble of a bird that held still long enough for her to record. There was a smattering of elvish words she knew, carefully and fancily lined, and a few phrases in common. There were a few benches and the outline of a person who she guessed was Sylitae, but there were no people otherwise.

She focused on the point of contact on her leg she’d made with Inrae, sat next to her on the bed casting spells, steadied her hand, and began to draw. She sketched a rough outline as lightly as her hand would allow, which wasn’t very, and fell into a comfortable rhythm.

It went against everything else she did. Her voice, mannerisms, the way she fought was all brute force. It didn’t feel rebellious, but it brought balance to her core. She needed to draw more often, she thought, but she couldn’t while horseback or fighting and that was where she spent most of her time. She couldn’t hold a pencil when both hands were filled with the hilt of a sword or the pole of a halberd. 

She stopped every so often, unconsciously tracing her fingers over the lines of his face as if she could feel its warmth. She knew her father probably looked different now. Even elves had to show some signs of age after three hundred years. 

She’d never drawn a person without them modeling in front of her and she didn’t fully trust her memory. Thinking back, she saw her father sparsely, but he was ingrained in her mind. Her petrification hadn’t erased any memories, only frozen them in time. She got a lot of her physicality from her mother, but it was her father’s hair, eyes, and the points of his ears she’d adopted. 

She should get herself some coloured pencils, too, she thought, scratching out his hair. Her drawing didn’t capture how red it was. 

Her heart warmed when Inrae complimented it. It was the best work she’d done in a while. Her superiors had never complimented her drawings, only her fellow soldiers. It felt nice to be praised on something that didn’t directly benefit anyone and wasn’t tied to combat.

She made a mental note to draw the rest of her team. They’d like that.


	5. Scar

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cadiana earns some new scars and considers her latest fight a failure of one of her tenants.
> 
> cw: blood in an image at the end

[18]

Cadiana’s adrenaline ribboned off behind her like smoke from a fire as she strode back to the inn, her fury dying into a searing ember in the pit of her stomach. She was amazed she left Tesvoosk intact given what he and his monstrous pet did to her. She wanted him dead and wanted to be the one to do the honour, had his throat in her hand, but that was for the authority of the city to decide.

Her tenants demanded she leave a defeat so devastating and humiliating that her enemies dared not rise to challenge her again, and she failed. If fear could not stop this creature, then the death of its master would. 

She swept by the elven woman she had shared the night with. Cadiana's blood was still spattered across her cheek and there was a distant, trembling look to her eyes. She hadn't processed what she'd seen. Cadiana understood. She brushed a kiss to her hand in apology and found her way to her room.

She peeled off her armour slower than she ever had before. It wasn't routine, but deliberate. Her pain started to make itself known in earnest. It wasn't like the heat of burns, but a sharp ache where her flesh had been torn and impaled. Her undershirt was in tatters and completely drenched. In the short time she'd been in her armour it picked up some of it, too. She discarded her shirt with a scowl. 

She grabbed a washcloth and began to wipe away the blood from her body, then her face. Even as she cleared most of it, she could still taste it in her teeth and in the back of her throat, threatening to well up again. She rinsed her mouth and brushed her teeth a second time. The cloth, once white, was pink and red. She discarded that as well. 

With the blood gone, she found the imprint of freshly scarred skin, two holes joining her stomach with her back and three clawed gashes cut diagonally from her belly to her clavicle. Healing worked from the inside out, stitched together the worst of the damage and left the skin for last, the bow on top. She gingerly ran her fingers over her abdomen, then over the burn scars on her forearms.

Her hands shook. There wouldn't be much left of her that wasn't scar soon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cady obliterated that boneclaw in two hits with a crit. It was great.


	6. Kin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cadiana thinks about the discovery of having a half-sister.

[20]

Sleep didn’t come easy. Cadiana sunk low into the mattress on the floor, her fingers woven over her stomach and her breathing slow and practised. Her body still ached from being swarmed and bitten and poisoned by giant centipedes earlier. Sleep _should_ have come easy.

Every day in Arythiliel was packed with revelations, discoveries, the unearthing of new knowledge. There was the ruins by the college spire, the mysterious centipede attacks, and the news of her sister.

She felt misplaced. She considered those who fought beside her brothers, sisters, and siblings. It shouldn’t have been difficult to make the leap to calling her half-sister a sister. It was a fact, but she didn’t know her even though they shared blood.

Cadiana tried to envision Ven in her mind. She imagined shaking her hand, of talking to her and hearing her voice. She thought of sparring with her, testing her skill, or training her. She thought of her father’s new partner and why they left him alone with a child. 

She tried to envision herself settling into a chair by the window by the sea with her family in Howe, her fighting a memory as distant as the horizon. 

She roused when Sylitae entered the room, almost too softly to be heard, and sat cross-legged on their bedroll to trance. Cadiana drifted back to her dreams without issue.


	7. Ruin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cadiana is still afraid to be underground.

[21]

Cadiana’s past venture into the underground hadn’t lasted long. Their group hadn’t walked long before they reached a mirror-like portal and when they passed through it, they were in a realm of clouds and light. From there they were transported to other planes: fire and swamp. It never felt like Cadiana was truly underground.

Here was a different story. Cady tensed as they descended further into the fey ruins and all light faded into darkness. She could still see, but she watched the colour leach from her surroundings. She hunched and became smaller as if all the weight of the rock above pressed down on her shoulders. 

At least she wasn’t paralyzed with fear this time. Perhaps it was the greenery lining their path that made her steps soft and padded instead of hard and loud. Any movement down here was nature incarnate, wild and untamed but not out to hurt her, as far as she could tell. 

But the rubble reminded her of stone limbs of people, broken apart. She clutched at the sleeve of Inrae’s shirt and braced her other hand on the pommel of her sword as her heart raced without her consent. Inrae didn’t pass judgement and for that she was grateful. 


	8. Neither

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cadiana is non-binary, yo.

Cadiana knew she wasn’t well-read. She wasn’t well-read even before she had time frozen on her and her world launched three hundred years into the future. She knew the basics on history and magic and then all of that changed on her.

There was little time for reading in her life when most hours were filled with rigorous training, praying, and religious doctrines. Her knowledge was shaped by the temple she lived in and the tenants she lived by. She was smart in other ways.

She didn’t know if there was a word for how she felt. She didn’t mind being called daughter or miss, those words weren’t wrong, but she watched Sylitae flow freely between pronouns and wondered what it felt like to be called he or they. Sylitae calling her handsome when they’d slapped a mustache on her face made her swell with pride and euphoria. She wanted more people to call her handsome.

She admired her short crop of hair, the sharp angles of her nose and cheek but also the softness of her lips. She enjoyed the way men’s clothes fit her body, made her look. She was neither a man or a woman, but something else.


	9. Bow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cadiana can’t make deals with criminals.

[23]

Cadiana's arm burned. 

As she and Inrae discussed how to deal with the Shade, it grew slowly. The more ideas they covered that involved acquiescing to criminal scum, the worse it became. Eventually she clutched it over her chainmail sleeve, the metal rings pinching and clicking under her gauntlet. Maybe if she squeezed enough her own grip would eclipse the burning. 

She knew of phantom pain and experienced it every so often, even with pain she had never felt, like her tusk and finger breaking off, but never this. She felt every word being branded into her arm repeat in her head, a harsh reminder of her tenants until it drowned out Inrae's ideas. 

Words weren't meant to be branded. They were difficult to read, but she had them memorized, seared into her mind as well as her skin. _Rule with an Iron Fist._

She knew not how to bow except to a higher power and authority. Cadiana didn’t have the same power the Order of the Steel Reign had as a unit. Ruling with an iron fist was easier with multiple members; alone, she couldn’t do it the way she was used to. It frustrated her that in the past, her order could have taken down the Shade, or at least frightened them into submission. 

Her new team was as close as she got to her order, but they each had their own ideals or codes they were beholden to, or none at all. She wanted to protect her father and Inrae’s mother and her temple, but she couldn’t abandon her tenants to do so. All that was left for her was to ignore them while Inrae offered them her services as a wizard. A noble thing, really, acting where Cadiana couldn’t. 

"I don't think I can," she said, and the pain receded. She released her arm and straightened, yet somehow felt more defeated than before. "You can make a deal with them. I can't."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Paladins of conquest have their tenants branded into their upper arm. How metal is that??


End file.
